Representative Bureaucracy and Street-Level Bureaucrats: The Effect of Police Gender and Race Representation

• In Event: 173 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. Politics and Gender

Abstract

This study employs the theory of representative bureaucracy to explore how individuals’ evaluations of government are shaped by the gender and race representativeness of police officers in local law enforcement agencies. Previous literature has identified police officers as street-level bureaucrats – government officials that deal directly with the public in service delivery and regulation (Lipsky 1981, Meier and Nicholson-Crotty 2006). People regularly see and are aware of the presence of police officers. Therefore, this paper applies the notion of police as street-level bureaucrats to the theory of representative bureaucracy to test for the effect of police officer race/gender representation on individuals’ evaluations of government. Using multilevel modeling, results show that police officer race representativeness is not related to respondent evaluations of government. The representation of women police officers, however, was found to predict positive evaluations of government for whites and ‘other’ race, but not for African Americans. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Author

• William Joslyn Scarborough, University of Illinois-Chicago